Mount Rushmore National Memorial is the magnificient carved mountain in the Black Hills near Keystone, South Dakota. Here are four 60feet high sculptures of U.S. Presidents - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, representing the first 150 years of the history of the United States of America.
Sculptor Gutzon Borglum, a student of the great French artist Auguste Rodin and one of America's most prolific artists, was commissioned to take up the work. Borglum was one of America's most successful artists. His Mares of Diomedes was the first work by an American artist ever purchased by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The great presidential figures were selected for the carving to create an eternal reminder of the birth, growth, preservation and development of a nation dedicated to democracy and the pursuit of individual liberty.
In the six-and-a-half years of work that occurred on and off between 1927 and 1941, Borglum employed almost 400 local workers. Some built roads, ran the hoist house, generated power or sharpened thousands of bits for the pneumatic drills. Others set dynamite charges or completed delicate finishing work on the sculpture. As the four faces emerged from the granite, the men who helped carve the memorial began to share the sculptor's dream and became caught up in a challenge that would produce a national treasure.
Among the most highly skilled workers were those using dynamite. Using techniques he had developed at Stone Mountain and relying on skills his crew had acquired in mining, Borglum used the explosive in an innovative way that helped to remove large amounts of rock quickly and relatively inexpensively. His powdermen became so skilled that they could blast to within four inches of the finished surface and grade the contours of the lips, nose, cheeks, neck and brow. In fact, 90 percent of the 450,000 tons of granite removed from the mountain were taken out with dynamite.
Borglum created a model of the four presidents on a one-to-12-inch scale, which has been preserved for viewing at the Sculptor's Studio. To transfer measurements from the model to the mountain, workers determined where the top of the head would be, then found the corresponding point on the model. A protractor was mounted horizontally on top of the model's head. A similar, albeit 12 times larger, apparatus was placed on the mountain. By substituting feet for inches, workers quickly determined the amount of rock to remove.
Next, drillers used the same measuring system and air-powered tools to drill closely spaced holes to exacting depths, a process known as "honeycombing." The rock between these holes was then broken away using chisels and hammers. The final process, known as "bumping," used a pneumatic drill and a special bit to leave the finished surface as smooth as a concrete sidewalk.
Mount Rushmore represents the largest work of art on earth. Each face is 60 feet high, compared to the head on the Statue of Liberty, which is only 17 feet tall.
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